I've recently had pretty much free access to a server (free = it belongs to me, not that I got it for free :P ) so I thought of making use of all that space by offering free hosting for AGS games.
However, even all that space won't last forever, so I'm wondering what's the best way to go about doing this. Any ideas? It's a cPanel Linux server located in Singapore, if that helps. I could give out cPanel accounts, but I expect most people won't really need the full features. I guess most people just need a simple bit of space to set up a web site, with an easy-to-use editor and file manager (or am I wrong here?).
I've already thought of offering space only to games that have at least a finished demo, and games of a certain quality... something like that.
I've registered a domain - agspace.ws - the domain extension doesn't mean anything, it was just the cheapest option :) Haven't done anything to the site yet.
how much space and traffic can you spare?
we're in the process of creating an archive of all ags-games, aka the aafiles on Fuzzpilz' bike, on two servers.
having a third mirror could be nice, but you'd need to have at least 6 GB free.
this is the current archive's size, i don't think it's complete yet.
I've got about 20GB free at the moment. Traffic is not actually limited, but I've received feedback that transfer is slow for countries on the other side of the globe.
I was thinking of all the games that don't have their own websites, only a page in the AGS games database. I thought this might be a good time to help them get websites, which are good for promoting the games :)
I'm surprised you think traffic isn't limited, as with disk space being as cheap as it is, bandwidth is the major limiting for websites these days.
To put it differently, if you're going to host any games that are (1) popular and (2) more than about ten megabytes in size, you will most likely get bandwidth issues. It is probably worth looking into that first.
Hold on, bandwidth isn't the same as traffic limit. For example, some hosting plans might limit you to 50BG/month traffic or something, and because I don't have a set plan, I don't have a limit on that. It's limited only by the bandwdth. Bandwidth is the speed of transfer, and that's definitely limited. As I mentioned, it will be slower the farther away you are from Singapore, but I can't say how slow.
So the issue is HOW popular the games above 10MB would be. Dasjoe mentioned that my server would be working as a third mirror, and I have no problems with that. I probably wouldn't last long as the only host of a popular, 100MB+ game.
I could really do about anything if you can host my file(10-15mb)